Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him, Behold thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.
1 Samuel 8:4-5
Whether anti-mission Baptists were Jacksonians, yeoman backwoodsmen, anxious patriarchs, hyper-Calvinists, or proponents of religious liberty and local church autonomy, historians have agreed on one thing: their fears of benevolent societies were irrational. Scholarly works on anti-mission Baptists, however, have failed to study the short-term and long-term effects of benevolent societies on the Baptist denomination and the changes in how Baptists viewed themselves in relation to the rest of society. In the short-term, early Baptist benevolent societies mirrored the rhetoric and actions of businesses and governments. The minutes of Baptist conventions were filled with records of expenditures, receipts, number of tracts sold, number of sermons preached, and how to carry out the goals of the convention efficiently. Prominent Baptists began to lobby the federal and state governments for help to carry out their moral mission of reforming the rest of society through law. While historians have rightly claimed that the brunt of Baptists’ progressive shift to the state occurred later in the century than
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the missionary society controversy, the roots for such a shift were in the benevolent societies of the 1810s and 1820s.
At the center of this transformation to a business-like efficiency was Luther Rice. Rice’s national Baptist university, Columbian College, was located in the nation’s capital to influence the federal government. Envisioned to be a Baptist university, seminary, law school, and medical school, Columbian College was an impressive endeavor. To finance the school, in addition to the missionary work that Rice and the Triennial Convention were planning, Rice worked with legislators and executive officials to receive government funds. Baptists who remembered their history of a dissenting, persecuted past were naturally averse to Rice’s attempts at direct political lobbying and large-scale fund-raising. Yet Rice did not have those memories of a persecuted past, for he converted to the Baptist faith while serving as a
Congregationalist missionary. Compared to his experiences with religion, especially the New England Congregationalists, Baptists seemed overly provincial and anti-modern. With the support of a few like-minded Baptists, Rice discarded the traditional Baptist belief in local church autonomy and attempted to create a modern, efficient, bureaucratic denominational structure.1
While Rice was one of the primary figures in the early missionary movement, by 1826 other members of the Triennial Convention suspected him of financial mismanagement. The convention assessed that Rice had dealt with over $20,000 from the convention’s treasury. A delegation from New York and New England clamped down on Rice and claimed that he had “been too loose in all his dealings.” Rice seemed “to have followed too much his own
1 William H. Brackney, “The General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination, 1814-1845: An American Metaphor,” Baptist History and Heritage 24 (July 1989): 15, 17-18.
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plans…thus abusing [the convention board’s] high confidence in him.”2 The convention found in that year that they were about $60,000 in debt in addition to almost $32,000 that they owed the federal government. Delegates believed that Rice had transferred funds from the Baptist Board for missions to Columbian College.3
The convention briefly rebounded from its debt after the Luther Rice scandal, but by the 1830s they were again in serious financial straits. Despite the lack of receipts to cover the annual expenditures in 1835, the convention decided to increase the number of missionaries. They optimistically claimed that they could raise $100,000 over the next year to cover the new debts they would incur. By 1838, however, expenditures exceeded revenues by over $43,000. In an attempt to regain solvency, the convention board hired a financial secretary Howard Malcom. Malcom reported that the convention must downsize its operations and establish a more regular source of income. In the 1840 annual meeting of the Baptist Convention Board, the board exhorted all local pastors to be agents for the convention. The board pressured local pastors to convince their congregants of the importance of the national convention’s evangelizing mission.
It is unclear how responsible Rice was for the alleged financial mismanagement, but his deals with federal officials and his notoriety around the country for skillfully extracting funds for missions seem to corroborate the convention board’s decision to censure Rice. Most importantly, these allegations confirmed many Baptists’ suspicion of the Triennial Convention.
4
2 Raymond Hargus Taylor, “The Triennial Convention, 1814-1845: A Study in Baptist Co-Operation and Conflict” (PhD dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1960), 105, 107-108.
Four years later, a report by the Committee on Finances exemplified the drastic shift towards a business mentality. “Great pains should be taken to invite wealthy individuals,” wrote the
3 Ibid, 112.
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Finance Committee, “to assume the expense of supporting missionaries and native preachers.” The committee report continued:
The time has now come when the interests of missions imperatively demand of pastors, that they become the financial agents of the Convention to their
respective congregations. It is not enough that pastors, from time to time, explain the missionary undertaking, and the duties and obligations of Christians. They must do more. They must devise means for raising funds; and having devised them, so as to reach every member of their respective congregations, they must keep them steadily, from year to year, before the people.5
The 1840s Baptist conventions did not regard pastors primarily as those who were “called to preach” but as “financial agents.” The image of the Baptist pastor who “devise[d] means for raising funds” was similar to the dystopian warnings of Lawrence, Taylor, and Parker. Just as Lawrence used the analogy of the yoke slowly placed on the ox to represent the gradual loss of Baptists’ freedom, the convention charged that congregants “must be habituated to labor, to give, and to pray.”6
The National Baptist Convention increasingly became a business organization concerned with expenditures, receipts, number of sermons preached, and number of tracts sold. Yet this trend towards business efficiency was not unusual. In the same period of the 1820s and 1830s, the North Carolina Baptist State Convention, a society made up of paying board directors, solicited $2,000 from North Carolina Baptists to purchase a plantation for the establishment of a seminary. They then asked Baptists around the state for $13,000 to create Wake Forest College. While raising money from churches and individuals, the state convention decided which
5 Baptist Missionary Magazine, 24 (July 1844): 168. 6 Baptist Missionary Magazine, 21 (June 1841): 163-164.
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churches should receive funds from the convention. For instance, the convention appropriated $100 to the Baptist church in Wilmington “on condition that they secure a [minister] who will be acceptable to the Convention.” In 1838, the state convention accused one agent, R. McNabb, of collecting more funds than he was allotted without sending those funds to the convention board. While the convention minutes did not elaborate any further on the issue, it seems that the
common accusation of missionaries preaching for money had some basis in reality. While the size of the state convention’s financial assets was considerably less than the national convention, the same trend toward business efficiency accompanied with financial scandals occurred
throughout the country with Baptist conventions.7
It should not be a surprise to find out that the North Carolina State Convention reported an increasing “apathy” and animosity among the state’s Baptists in the following years. To raise money for theological education in the state, the convention board appointed a committee “to take immediate measures to secure the amount of $17,000.” Yet that same year Francis Hawley, a Home Missions agent, reported, “It is a painful fact that almost general apathy prevails among the churches where I have traveled relative to the interest of the Redeemer’s Kingdom.” In a reversal of rhetoric concerning “the world,” Hawley claimed that anti-mission Baptists had “evidently drunk deep into a worldly spirit….There can be but little doubt that the Sabbath School and temperance cause are on the retrograde; many who once put their hands to the plow have looked back.”
8
7 Livingston Johnson, History of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton Printing Co., 1908), 16-30.
For Hawley and the missionary Baptist leaders of North Carolina, Baptists were not supporting the convention—that is, the “Redeemer’s Kingdom”—because of greed and “a worldly spirit.” Anti-mission Baptists had claimed that missionary Baptists interpreted the
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opposition to state conventions or benevolent societies as greedy and unchristian behavior.9
Anti-mission Baptists of the 1830s denounced the missionary rhetoric of efficiency and finances as truly “worldly” and an aberration from previous Baptist behavior. The Signs of the Times called the benevolent societies the “factory” of missions. In a satire on missionary Baptists, they claimed that Christians “must be made expeditiously, for you know there is great danger: they may die before they are manufactured.” Fortunately for the denomination, “the price for making Christians had fallen from $17.50 per head, to $3.50; this great difference is thought to be owing to the systematic application of the means of grace to the hearts of sinners, and the blessed effects of sunday-schools, the distribution of pious tracts, and temperance societies.”
In 1836 North Carolina, anti-mission Baptists were certainly correct in their interpretation.
10
Although the Signs of the Times contributors exaggerated, the minutes of Baptist conventions in the 1830s were filled with charts recording donations, expenses, new converts, and new churches. The conventions advertised their progress in evangelizing to the world, but they also emphasized that if they did not gain more donations every year, unbelieving souls would be lost. The supposed decreasing price of converting Christians due to more efficient means was only slightly hyperbolic. Instead of purity and dissent, efficiency and progress became the new ideals of missionary Baptists.11
In his book Democratic Religion, Gregory A. Wills has noted the same kind of rhetorical shift towards efficiency and progress among nineteenth-century Baptists. Wills claims that
9 While mission Baptists perceived opposition to conventions as greedy, mission Baptists often accused Baptists who refused to join temperance societies as “fatally wedded to their bottles.” In response to this accusation, one anti-mission Baptist claimed that “every religious society is a temperance society” and that it was “rather
degrading to a Baptist to join himself to a society of this kind.” Columbian Star, July 11, 1829. 10 Signs of the Times, November 11, 1835.
11 For example, see A Republication of the Minutes of the Mississippi Baptist Association, from its organization in 1806 to the Present Time (New Orleans: Hinton, 1849). By the 1840s, the Mississippi Baptist Association devoted increasingly more space and time to the financial committee reports.
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Baptist churches were moving towards an ideal of efficiency in the 1840s, but by the 1870s they completed their transformation. Missionary Baptists had not yet given up on church discipline, but conventions pressured pastors to gain new members and attract wealthy individuals to give to the missions cause. As churches felt the need to expand, congregations could no longer be as tightly knit or disciplined as before. Pastors attempted to be efficient managers of pious workers. Churches graded the “spiritual power” of their pastors based on “improvement of the church property, increased effort in the benevolent enterprises of the church, [and] larger attendance upon public worship.” If Baptists clung to these measures as the standard for a good church, then church discipline would slowly fall by the wayside.12
To take the place of church discipline, Baptists felt compelled to maintain some degree of control over their congregations and the rest of society. The most efficient method of control for an increasingly popular church was through law. While Baptists enacted laws based on their own moral beliefs most successfully in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were already making significant attempts to do so by the 1830s and 1840s. The Georgia Temperance Society, founded by the missionary Baptist Adiel Sherwood, became an
organization of total abstinence from alcohol in 1832, but only six years later the society was already lobbying the Georgia state legislature to prohibit all alcohol sales. In his tract supporting the complete prohibition of alcohol, Sherwood claimed, “The authority to retail intoxicating liquors…is a fearful and dangerous power to put into the hands of any individual whatsoever.”
13
12 Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131-134.
The Little Rock Temperance Society in Arkansas also announced its intention to prohibit the sale
13 Melancthon [Adiel Sherwood], An Essay on the Defects of the License Law, as Now Existing in Georgia (Penfield, Georgia: Benjamin Brantly, 1845), 4.
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of alcohol in 1842 to preserve what they felt was “our natural rights as citizens.”14
In Mississippi, a state which many easterners regarded as untamable frontier territory, missionary Baptists used the power of the state and federal government to help carry out their social goals. The Mississippi Baptist Convention supported that “energetic measures…be devised” to remove alcohol “from every grade of society.” After the legislature of Maine prohibited alcohol in 1851, the Mississippi Baptist Convention announced its full support for a complete prohibition of alcohol by law.
While the morality of drinking alcohol was still an open issue among Baptists, many missionary Baptist leaders attempted to prohibit anyone, Baptist or not, from selling alcohol.
15
Long before the 1850s, however, Mississippians had used the law to prohibit alcohol by county. In Lafayette County, local religious leaders,
including Baptists, prohibited the sale of alcohol from the county’s creation in 1836.16
Regarding evangelization and Indian affairs, the Mississippi Baptist Convention resolved in 1853 “to urge the government of the United States to set apart two or more other Territories…and concentrate tribes and remnant of tribes as fast as practicable upon said Territories.” Blending secular and divine goals, they claimed, “We believe it would be to the interest of the
Government, the Indians and the cause of our Redeemer.”17
14 Ben F. Johnson III, John Barleycorn Must Die: The War Against Drink in Arkansas (Fayetteville: University Press of Arkansas, 2005), 12.
The Mississippi State Convention, the virtual voice of the state’s Baptists, decided that they could best accomplish the divine purpose of evangelization by requesting military force to concentrate Indians into more manageable territories.
15 Richard Aubrey McLemore, A History of Mississippi Baptists, 1780-1970 (Jackson: Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, 1971), 158-159.
16 T.J. Bailey, Prohibition in Mississippi; or, Anti-Liquor Legislation from Territorial Days, with its Results in the Counties (Jackson, Miss.: Hederman Bros., 1917), 186.
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The new breed of Baptists, intent on appealing to civil authorities to legislate moral issues, looked upon the state of society with dismay. Thomas Meredith, a Baptist leader in North Carolina, exemplified a growing concern for social unrest. Like other prominent missionary Baptists, Meredith was born in the Northeast. While receiving a classical education at the University of Pennsylvania, he converted to the Baptist faith. After one year of theological training in 1816, the newly-baptized Meredith went to New Bern, North Carolina as a missionary where he would be one of the primary founders of the North Carolina Baptist State
Convention.18
In 1839, Meredith published an article in the Southern Baptist Pulpit which addressed what he thought were the primary social problems and threats to order. After expressing concern with the growing number of Catholics, or the “Man of Sin,” as well as “various forms of
infidelity,” Meredith denounced what he called “popular excitement.”
19
“The majesty of the law has been trampled under foot,” he wrote. Society seemed too independent, unchristian, and unwieldy for Meredith. Furthermore, the traditionally decentralized polity of Baptist churches was not beneficial for social order. He wondered “by what means [the Bible] can be brought to exert its full force on the popular mass.” The answer, for Meredith, was public education. While “common school education” was “more properly the work of our philosophers and statesmen,” he asserted that “the influence of the Scriptures on the popular mind, might be vastly increased” through “the employment of the Bible as a school book.”20
18 Mary Lynch Johnson, “Meredith, Thomas,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 256-257; Bernard H. Cochran, “Meredith, Thomas,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Sameul S. Hill (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984), 466.
Meredith’s conservative social values bled into the progressive notion of increasing access to state-funded public schools.
19 Thomas Meredith, “The Moral Power of the Sacred Scriptures,” Southern Baptist Pulpit 1 (November 1839): 9- 12.
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Baptists and Christians of like-minded denominations could use public schools to achieve greater social order, evangelize young children who were ignorant of Christianity, and create a
homogenous ecumenical Christianity led by the state’s leading clergy members.
As Baptist leaders gradually took control of social and political issues, anti-mission Baptists continued to voice their displeasure at these political measures. The Primitive Baptist published numerous letters from readers opposing the influence of temperance societies on politics. One reader decried the attempts of temperance societies to enact legislation to prohibit alcohol, “thus trying to cramp the conscience of their fellow men, and make laws to deprive them of liberty of conscience, and then cry at every corner liberty of conscience.” The reader finished his
argument by arguing, “Drunkenness is an evil, but no man has a right to make a law to keep his fellow man from it.”21 Regarding Sabbath laws, Mark Bennett of the Primitive Baptist wrote, “We do not believe there…ever ought to be a statute or State law to compel people to observe actively any religious rite or ceremony.” Consistent with anti-mission Baptists’ strict adherence to Baptist principles regarding the Sabbath, however, they urged others to “try to persuade [those who break the Sabbath], without attempting to pull down civil institutions and privileges.”22
Yet, despite the ardent and quite popular opposition to using the state for religious motives, much of the scholarly discussion on early religious benevolent societies either glosses over religious opposition to reforms or disregards it based on its “curious compound of sincerity and hypocrisy,” in the words of one temperance historian.
23
21 Primitive Baptist, January 27, 1838.
Consequently, few historians have taken seriously the anti-mission Baptists’ genuine opposition to laws pertaining to religion on the grounds of individual liberty and local church autonomy. Given the vast chasm between civil
22 Ibid, April 15, 1837.
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governments and God’s law, according to the anti-mission Baptist, Gilbert Beebe, it was
exceedingly presumptuous for “human legislatures which God shall obliterate…to point out the course in which God requires his children to move.”24
As the nineteenth century continued, Baptists did not create a direct state church
establishment, but the influence of missionary Baptists, especially in the South, grew to such an extent that political leaders could not ignore their demands. While they would continue to
evangelize and use moral suasion to spread their beliefs, the temptation to use the coercive power